A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead. The job of a writer, he’d learned over time, was not to try to tell a story in its entirety, but to tell an inevitably abbreviated version in the most interesting way one could. Giving shape and direction to something otherwise formless and elastic. Cause and effect. Action and reaction. Lede and kicker.
